Some day, far down the road, we'll be sitting with our grandchildren at our feet. As we rock in our holochairs watching the virtual sunset in our Googlezon immersi-room, we'll get all nostalgic. We'll look back on the period of May to June 2013 fondly, remembering all those memes we posted and those angry diatribes we wrote. We'll look down fondly at those tiny children, busy killing zombies in ActiBethesdaValve-Blizzard's Portal to World of Call of Fallout 6, and we'll say something like the following:

"Little Jimmy, did I ever tell you about the days when I fought and won in the great Microsoft used-game/Internet check-in battle of '13?"

It's a bit too easy to say that Microsoft's surprise reversal of its controversial game licensing policies today was just a reaction to the strident voices of a few on the Internet—that may have been how it started, though. In the high-pressure echo chamber of E3 last week, the unfortunate impression of Microsoft's next system started to leak into the mainstream, getting ink in big namenewspapers and magazines and even getting an applause-grabbing negative mention on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night. When your system is on the verge of becoming a joke for a late night comedian, you know something must be done.

Of course, if Sony followed Microsoft's lead in pushing the same kinds of potential restrictions on game discs, Microsoft probably could have ridden out any negative reaction to its decision. If Microsoft and Sony united on these issues, gamers would be left with nowhere to turn. Mobile and tablet games aren't nearly mature enough, the Wii U is not powerful enough to offer a true alternative for a large block of gamers, and the PC never had used games (and often uses online checks for many titles). Instead, Sony loudly called Microsoft out at its E3 press conference, garnering a huge reaction from both the press and gamers and potentially accelerating Microsoft's reversal.

Many will see today's decision as a loss for the game publishers that are often quite vocal in their hatred for used game sales, which they see as taking money directly out of their pockets. But there are some indications that the publishers weren't really pushing for the kinds of restrictions Microsoft was planning to allow on Xbox One games. In fact, many publishers were seemingly caught flat-footed when the policy was announced. What's more, not a single publisher was willing to publicly say that it would take advantage of the new used-disc-blocking abilities Microsoft gave them, perhaps fearing the public reaction they had already seen Microsoft receive. Without more explicit support from publishers, Microsoft was left twisting in the wind.

A Pyrrhic victory?

Here's the thing, though: we may have all actually lost something in winning today. In his statement, Microsoft's Don Mattrick said the company "imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing, and new ways to try and buy games" in crafting its original Xbox One licensing policy. It's not too hard to envision a number of benefits that were only really feasible in a world where all Xbox One games were installed to a hard drive and connected to a cloud-equipped Xbox Live account that checked in regularly.

Maybe Microsoft could have created a Netflix style "all-you-can-play" deal that gave players access to a large portion of the system's library for a set monthly price. Maybe a more limited, digital GameFly could allow for rotating, user-selected game downloads that changed every month. Maybe they could have allowed players to loan any of their digital games to anyone around the world for a limited, 12-hour test run as a way to spread the word about an excellent title. Maybe they could have announced a set pricing structure that encouraged downloadable games to drop down to a percentage of their original price months or years after their release.

Here's the problem: Microsoft didn't do any of those things. Any of these benefits remained "imagined," while the benefits that were actually announced were weak tea. Microsoft's "easier roaming" by downloading your games at a friend's house wasn't easier at all—these remote downloads would have actually been much less convenient than just bringing along a disc. The 10-member "family sharing" plan sounded intriguing, but Microsoft couldn't answer extremely basic questions about how it worked. Could two people play two different shared games in your library at the same time? No one at Microsoft seemed willing to say. Being able to play your entire library on your hard drive without having to get up and switch discs is nice, but it's hardly a "killer app" given the drawbacks.

The way Microsoft rolled out its vision of the brave new digital-focused future was full of concrete negatives and only fuzzy, imagined positives. If Microsoft announced some truly revolutionary (and value-adding) digital game sharing and renting policies alongside its online requirements and used game restrictions, maybe the medicine would have gone down better. As it stood, the massive backlash was practically inevitable.

When I got back from E3 last week, I called my mom for a regular check-in. Obviously, I brought up the show and the battle between Sony and Microsoft. When I described Microsoft's game licensing policies to her, she said they were "the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard."

When she asked incredulously why Microsoft did what it did, I found myself fumbling for an answer. Despite recently having a long sit down with Microsoft's marketing chief where he was tasked with answering this very question, I found myself struggling. I couldn't easily explain to my own mother why in the world she should see Microsoft's "digital future" as anything but stupid.

This was, in effect, the problem. Microsoft's moves to slowly strangle the life out of the disc-based game failed the "mom test" because there was nothing strong enough to counterbalance the obvious hassles and annoyances that it imposed. And that's a shame, because it's not that hard to envision the world that Microsoft apparently did, where purely digital game libraries actually let console makers and publishers offer new and interesting ways to get access to their games, in exchange for those disc-based and online-connected annoyances. But Microsoft utterly and completely failed to sell that vision, so here we are.

By the time the next generation of consoles rolls around, we may not be so lucky. High-speed Internet access will be nearly ubiquitous in many countries by then, and the cost and speed of bandwidth will have progressed enough that shipping discs to stores will seem like a costly and slow anachronism (see: record stores, Borders, Blockbuster video). Chances are, by then, the major console makers will finally be bold enough to eliminate physical media from their hardware plans altogether (see: iTunes, Kindle, Netflix, Hulu, et al.).

At that point, no amount of screaming by the principled faithful is going to convince a critical mass of people that they should be able to sell or loan out a product that exists only as bits in the cloud. The major players could easily see fit to just not enable any kind of digital sharing or resale features without too much backlash (see: Steam, iTunes).

So yes, the market has spoken and the Internet won today. The forces that would have changed the way your gaming discs worked were rebuffed and forced back by sheer will. But in another way, we all lost the potential to see whatever Microsoft's vision of the digital future actually was. Instead in all likelihood, we'll eventually get a digital future that looks a lot like the digital present—only without any discs at all.

Promoted Comments

If MS REALLY wanted to do what they said they would, they could have kept both parts, download only games would function as previously described with all the check ins, disabled if you can't check in, and family sharing, while disc based games would be playable with the disc in the drive, playable offline and have the ability to be resold, traded, etc.

They didn't need to choose an "either/or."

The trouble was it wasn't about "teh future!" It was about killing off GameStop and securing extra revenue for the publishers (which would then heap MS with exclusives). But keeping both worlds, digital with the extras and physical media with the rights, doesn't kill GameStop. If it really was going to be a transitional phase from physical to digital media, they would keep both.

They could still implement those neat sharing features as a perk of games purchased through XBox Live. It would be a nice little push to get people to buy digitally while still acknowledging people who have shitty internet and can't do much with it. No one misses out on new games that come out, and they still get to toy around with the new features in a way that could be acceptable for the masses.

Which is it, folks? Is disc-based DRM king of gaming and the mandate of the people, or is digital sharing a good thing that, thanks to a combination of HORRIFIC PR and band-wagoning, isn't coming anymore?

I think the point is that we want to see rights retained AND see progress in distribution and use of media.

People recognized the problem with physical sales since it was clear that MS was taking something away, and people generally GET physical sales. You can hold it in your hand, so you should own it.

The conundrum here is that 100% digital distribution today (and in the forseeable future) gives the consumer ZERO rights. Someone else gets to decide what you do with your property. It's not limited to games (and it's not purely limited to digital distribution, though that's the biggest problem)

You can opt-in to daily checks if you want to play without the disc. If you lose internet you have to put the disc back in.

For disc resale, flag disc based installs on your account that are opted in so that when you uninstall the game the license is released. GameStop or whoever is still going to have to verify somehow that the license was released, though. If there was a unique id in the disc they would be able to put the disc in a reader of sorts that connects to Xbox Live and verifies that it's free and clear. That only works in retail scenarios, but GameStop could offer a disc check for a small fee for when you sell your disc to a friend. That sounds like an extra step for friend to friend sales, sure, but that's only if you opted in to play without a disc. They would do the check regardless if you are selling to them.

(The previous two points could be hard to implement so not allowing to opt in for disc-less play would be OK.)

Keep all of the sharing options (10 family members etc.) for digital downloads and disc based installs that opted in. If the game owner goes offline, make the disc based shared games unavailable.

Allow the Kinect to be turned off unless a game requires it.

Drop the price $50. $100 is too big of a gap. A $50 difference is easier to justify, especially if Xbox has more to offer for going disc-less.

I would love to see this implemented, it would be the best of both worlds and I would recommend the Xbox One to every one I know, no matter their preference or internet situation.

It seems that they could have had a much more nuanced change in their DRM policies. We could have had the best of both worlds - an in-between place between what we had last generation and what we're getting in the next.

My guess is they were running out of time to control the snowballing bad PR. This was playing real-world havoc on sales projections and the need for a strong launch. They were forced, then, to retreat back to the easiest policy imaginable: the status-quo.

Once they have time to think it through, we'll probably see some of the more progressive, consumer friendly, ideas come back.

40 posts | registered Dec 3, 2002

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

465 Reader Comments

The sub-headline is pretty frustrating. Most publications simply piled on the Sony PR of how awful the future was and how everybody loves discs. Now I see a ton of articles about how this widely demanded about-face is "everyone's loss"?

Which is it, folks? Is disc-based DRM king of gaming and the mandate of the people, or is digital sharing a good thing that, thanks to a combination of HORRIFIC PR and band-wagoning, isn't coming anymore?

It is a damn shame the vocal media has influenced this change. Personally I was looking forward to not being required to ever put my game-disc back into the console after it was installed, and since I have a dedicated broadband connection the whole 24-hour check thing wasn't a concern of mine. Not only that but the old restriction of need-disc to launch a game will prohibit the digital game-share feature (one of the most interesting things Microsoft had to offer) from staying around.

Basically we lost two great features that made console gaming on par with and surpass PC gaming. I don't know about you all, but ever since graduating college I don't live near enough to my friends and family to just go out and lend them a hard copy of my game, nor do I have the precious free time.

The one positive thing to come out of this is that the console won't be region locked. I can't help but think Microsoft could have merely come to a compromise, like a 3-day or 1-week check to ensure you haven't sold or transfered the physical license of your game while keeping the features that set the system apart from competitors.

Edit: If you haven't taken the opportunity to read the source http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update please do so, it will keep you from having to guess or ponder on what this means.

So a failure to completely transition to a "user owns nothing, rents everything" in the console space... is a loss?

Next thing you'll know, people will be telling me I'm a damn fool for preferring paper books when I could buy wonderful DRM'd ebooks and pay monthly, forever, to stream all my music rather than ripping CDs and having to manage my music collection!

And there's a simple reason Microsoft didn't promise all the cool things you envisioned, Kyle: it's not up to Microsoft to tell publishers how to sell or rent their wares. They are a hardware and firmware middleman for the most part.

And you, an industry vet, probably already knew this.

Did it not occur to you in the 'mom test' to point out that you could buy a game and then she could play it for free by virtue of being in your family circle without you mailing or schlepping it X miles to her beforehand? Or did your mom just not give a fuck about that?

There has to be a middle road to go down that can satisfy both sides of this debate. Unfortunately it doesn't look like Microsoft will take those steps.

They try too hard to force consumers into their vision of the future and people naturally fought back. One day it might be all digital, but the DRM, the restrictions, the license-but-not-own format does not sit well with most people.

Just a small note.. At least here in Canada there was a used PC game market for a time .. That is until game companies were somehow able to take it away.

And it seems like the tablet ...microsoft was there first but has left it for someone else to sell the vision and reap the rewards. But i would sure love to know why MS went through all this trouble when they said their own games would not be so restricted. I was sure it was 3rd party publishers but that just does not seem the case now.

I am happy with this new announcement, as I enjoy game rental (GameFly). But I think the disc-less design could have worked if there was clearer value offered to make up for the DRM restriction, such as lower price for games. If the non-resellable game were sold for 40$ or 50$, then gamers would see the DRM policy less as a loss and more as potentially beneficial trade-off.

the xbox change literally means nothing when their games still use cloud rendering or cloud AI.....

really this is too little too late. the damage has been done and I will still be purchasing a ps4.

So lemme get this right, the Xbox One wasn't even released yet, and its damage done.

Meanwhile Sony got hacked and did nothing about it for weeks. Shut down LikSangHad a wonderful rootkit debacle and the related "damage control" which amounted to "why should users care"Killed OtherOSRemoved hardware after hardware from each PS3 iteration

This was basically the Heckler's Veto. I'm disappointed in Microsoft. I was looking forward to seeing what Microsoft could do differently, instead we get more of the same. I'm not saying Microsoft would have delivered something great, but it would have been nice to see what it could have done, given the chance.

I have a 100GB cap every month. Until these go away and 50mbps service is more ubiquitous, these ideas will not fly. What I couldn't figure out is why they didn't try to have their cake and eat it too. Guys like me can buy disks that will always work in a console, more forward thinking people could buy the digital download with all of the goodness that that entails.

iTunes and Netflix (don't know about Hulu as I'm not in the US) are poor comparators for digital game downloads though, because they don't offer an identical quality of product. Neither of them match the quality of the physical product (music CD vs iTunes music, Bluray vs either's movies) - though admittedly the convenience is evidently worth the drop in quality for many/most consumers.

Digital game downloads are only like iTunes and Netflix if the digital download version restricts you to 720p and DX10 graphics, while the boxed version has 1080p and DX11.

Had a wonderful rootkit debacle and the related "damage control" which amounted to "why should users care"

The XCP rootkit was made by Sony Records (headquartered in New York, subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America), not Sony Computer Entertainment (headquartered in Tokyo, subsidiary of Sony Corporation, makes Playstations). The rest is correct though.

the xbox change literally means nothing when their games still use cloud rendering or cloud AI.....

really this is too little too late. the damage has been done and I will still be purchasing a ps4.

So lemme get this right, the Xbox One wasn't even released yet, and its damage done.

Meanwhile Sony got hacked and did nothing about it for weeks. Shut down LikSangHad a wonderful rootkit debacle and the related "damage control" which amounted to "why should users care"Killed OtherOSRemoved hardware after hardware from each PS3 iteration

Yet Microsoft's damage for an UNRELEASED product is "damage done".

Wow, we live in a strange world.

yes, more points that are well known. As a consumer, the damage IS done. how are we to trust that they won't re-implement this a year or two down the road? using sony as an example of a company with a big head, why should I trust microsoft to NOT do the same?

or am I to trust that the patent they hold on visual DRM for movies etc won't be put into use sometime down the road when someone like the mpaa says "okay hit the switch guys!!"

the xbox change literally means nothing when their games still use cloud rendering or cloud AI.....

really this is too little too late. the damage has been done and I will still be purchasing a ps4.

So lemme get this right, the Xbox One wasn't even released yet, and its damage done.

Meanwhile Sony got hacked and did nothing about it for weeks. Shut down LikSangHad a wonderful rootkit debacle and the related "damage control" which amounted to "why should users care"Killed OtherOSRemoved hardware after hardware from each PS3 iteration

Yet Microsoft's damage for an UNRELEASED product is "damage done".

Wow, we live in a strange world.

yes, more points that are well known. As a consumer, the damage IS done. how are we to trust that they won't re-implement this a year or two down the road? using sony as an example of a company with a big head, why should I trust microsoft to NOT do the same?

Two companies. One has gone back on what they promised and changed their policy after selling the product. The other heard from their customer and changed policy favorably (to those people) before it was ever released. Somehow you try to justify siding with the first. Good show.

And there's a simple reason Microsoft didn't promise all the cool things you envisioned, Kyle: it's not up to Microsoft to tell publishers how to sell or rent their wares. They are a hardware and firmware middleman for the most part.

Except that's nonsense. Microsoft is also a major publisher in its own right on Xbox. Microsoft was quite happy to talk about the [limited] resale options that it was supporting, and those were only for Microsoft-published titles. The company certainly could have talked about other things it planned to do with its new (and now sadly defunct) Steam-like platform.

So a failure to completely transition to a "user owns nothing, rents everything" in the console space... is a loss?

Next thing you'll know, people will be telling me I'm a damn fool for preferring paper books when I could buy wonderful DRM'd ebooks and pay monthly, forever, to stream all my music rather than ripping CDs and having to manage my music collection!

I believe that the shift from buying media as a good to buying media as a service actually makes sense. I'm the kind of person who doesn't really watch movies more than once in the lifespan of any medium, so buying a copy of a movie doesn't really appeal to me, but paying for Netflix is interesting. My musical tastes are still a bit too narrow to justify paying monthly, but I can imagine that some people would do it.I can also see myself doing that for single-player video games, that I basically play once and leave to collect the dust.

Books will remain an exception for a while because the overlaps of the benefits of digital books and physical books are fairly low. Buying a paperback book lets you read it anywhere as long as you've got any kind of light source. Buying a digital books lets you do plenty of things, like non-destructive annotations, a quick find, integrate some more media, keeping track of where you were, and all that stuff, but you still need a powered device to read them. The use cases are still different enough to justify the physical form.

iTunes and Netflix (don't know about Hulu as I'm not in the US) are poor comparators for digital game downloads though, because they don't offer an identical quality of product. Neither of them match the quality of the physical product (music CD vs iTunes music, Bluray vs either's movies) - though admittedly the convenience is evidently worth the drop in quality for many/most consumers.

Digital game downloads are only like iTunes and Netflix if the digital download version restricts you to 720p and DX10 graphics, while the boxed version has 1080p and DX11.

What if the game download streams data on-demand as you play the game?

So you buy the game and it begins playing basically immediately. Streaming only the data you need as you need it.

^ Announced feature of Xbox One.

I am so, SO happy that at least same-day digital is still here and didn't get gimped.

Discs are horseshit.

Not necessarily relevant to the convenience-vs-quality question though. If it provides identical graphics/sound/etc. quality to the disc-based product, then it isn't like iTunes or Netflix (it's better).

It seems like you're coming to this conclusion based upon pie in the sky possibilities instead of actual facts. Not a huge fan of the link bait subtitle which is literally rooted in "Kyle Orland's Cool Cloud Ideas!".

If this means good bye to the family sharing I'm going to be mad. I was more then happy to have the possibility of buying a game that I can't resell, have to do 24 hour check ins, to have that one feature which is way way cooler and far more pro-consumer then anything Sony has done.

Normally I find pieces by Kyle Orland to be insightful and interesting. This time, I found it simply confusing.

For one thing, this change in policy does not do anything to stop most of the wonderful possibilities you hoped for. This change does nothing at all to stop a digital distribution system which would enable an "all you can play plan" and the former policy did nothing that I could see to encourage them to develop one.

I do see how it would complicate a "Family Sharing Plan", but since Microsoft never gave us any idea of how their family sharing plan would actually have worked we have no clue about what we might possibly be losing here (and most incarnations of the idea were not big selling points for me to start with).

What this does is ensure that we have at least some semblance of ownership over the physical media we buy. It also shows that Microsoft is willing to listen to their customers. I see these as an unmitigated good things.

Just a small note.. At least here in Canada there was a used PC game market for a time .. That is until game companies were somehow able to take it away.

There was definitely a pre-owned market for PC games in the UK too. I used to pick them up at blockbuster. This was of course before the age of Steam (which more or less made pre owned games pointless for me) so I don't know if anyone still does them but I doubt it.

I believe that the shift from buying media as a good to buying media as a service actually makes sense.

Perhaps, if you like to pay in perpetuity for things. It's something the media companies have wanted for ages but have as yet failed to achieve.

Quote:

I'm the kind of person who doesn't really watch movies more than once in the lifespan of any medium, so buying a copy of a movie doesn't really appeal to me, but paying for Netflix is interesting. My musical tastes are still a bit too narrow to justify paying monthly, but I can imagine that some people would do it.I can also see myself doing that for single-player video games, that I basically play once and leave to collect the dust.

But an industry wide, unilateral shift? It's one thing to have Netflix as an option, it'd be another thing entirely to have Netflix be the only option (moreso, given the propensity for blocking by geolocation.) In a way it reminds me of the old DivX Gold discs - you could pay once and have it forever, but it had to authenticate every time. And then you had Disney saying they would never release Gold discs - you would always have to rent it.

Quote:

Books will remain an exception for a while because the overlaps of the benefits of digital books and physical books are fairly low. Buying a paperback book lets you read it anywhere as long as you've got any kind of light source. Buying a digital books lets you do plenty of things, like non-destructive annotations, a quick find, integrate some more media, keeping track of where you were, and all that stuff, but you still need a powered device to read them. The use cases are still different enough to justify the physical form.

Physical books also lack DRM and region locking. Given how many books I import these days, I'd hate for it to be arbitrarily cut off from me, which seems to be the cool thing to do these days in e-commerce (artificial barriers based on region only serve to encourage piracy, then they cry while refusing to take my money.)

I'm not a big fan of the way Kyle blames 'the internet' (ie the unwashed masses) for the change, or that he feels Microsoft's reversal is a bad thing. Pipe dreams of what might have been are all well and good but due to the fact that none of said dreams were reality I really don't see the point in imaginging up a world of something that was not happening anyway.

"I'm disappointed this didn't happen because X thing may have possibly happened some indeterminate time in the future" ?! (paraphrasing)

People were so vociferous in their dislike of the policy because of what is (was), not what it may have been.

Why are we assuming that just because discs now work liked the used to.. All the "Cool" "Useful" features of the licensed model are disabled? There's no reason you shouldn't be able to download your game to your friends console to share.. Or share with your family.. or any of the other Digital options you had before.. assuming you have internet access to 'verify' the DRM..

Want to play something offline or disable the online checks? Sure thing!! you just better have that disc available to play. works just fine.. gets best of both worlds.

the xbox change literally means nothing when their games still use cloud rendering or cloud AI.....

really this is too little too late. the damage has been done and I will still be purchasing a ps4.

So lemme get this right, the Xbox One wasn't even released yet, and its damage done.

Meanwhile Sony got hacked and did nothing about it for weeks. Shut down LikSangHad a wonderful rootkit debacle and the related "damage control" which amounted to "why should users care"Killed OtherOSRemoved hardware after hardware from each PS3 iteration

Yet Microsoft's damage for an UNRELEASED product is "damage done".

Wow, we live in a strange world.

That's a marvelous strawman you have going there, but in general one compares product A to product B, not "product A + all the bad things company A has done" to "product B while conspicuously ignoring the bad things company B has done".

I am far from sold on this thesis: Microsoft overreached: they succumbed to some mixture of myopia, unwillingness to offer different products to customers who valued different things, and sheer arrogance.

So, they decided that the bold, new, model would be The Only Way, and if you didn't like that you could go cry.

When that didn't work, they annnounced that they were totally abandoning the plan, and you wouldn't even have the option to do things The Future way.

Compare to, say, the PC market: If I want "the future", internet connection required and no physical media except to print a redemption code on, I can buy a game from Steam. If I want the physical media, I buy from Amazon or whoever. The future has to sell itself on its own merits.

Had Microsoft gone down that road(digital downloads, or disks you wish to associate with your XBL profile behave according to their 'new plan', disks you just shove in and play behave as disks shoved into consoles and played have always behaved) they would have had no problem. Take it or leave it, your call.

Anybody buying a console is(unless wildly confused) not opposed to DRM in principle; but anytime you learn that something is "Exciting and Mandatory #dealwithit" you know that you are in for a screwjob.

Had they just done a soft-sell, with Steam-esque discounts for the 'haha, no first sale for you!' version(which, if numbers are to be believed, are very popular indeed), they'd probably have a substantial majority of net-connected customers right where they want them. Making people want to do what you want them to do works...

If MS REALLY wanted to do what they said they would, they could have kept both parts, download only games would function as previously described with all the check ins, disabled if you can't check in, and family sharing, while disc based games would be playable with the disc in the drive, playable offline and have the ability to be resold, traded, etc.

They didn't need to choose an "either/or."

The trouble was it wasn't about "teh future!" It was about killing off GameStop and securing extra revenue for the publishers (which would then heap MS with exclusives). But keeping both worlds, digital with the extras and physical media with the rights, doesn't kill GameStop. If it really was going to be a transitional phase from physical to digital media, they would keep both.

There's no reason why we can't have both used game reselling and digital downloads tied to a user account. In fact, we have that right now with XBLA, but it is instead a matter of scale for complete Blu-ray sized games.

There's also no reason that I am aware of why the console really has to phone home. I have yet to hear of anything that they were extolling that really needed the new DRM and couldn't be done with the status quo systems. And that's the problem.

Pre-ordered the Ps4 after e3 and look forward to playing Destiny on it.

I just can't trust even this reversal after all the drips and dribbles of data. Even MS couldn't seem to understand their new policy. If they couldn't, why should I get a headache trying to figure it out?

maybe i am too ignorant to understand the wonders that would have been WBone 180 but...Sorry Halo. You just aren't a big enough selling point.

Edit: and i call bullpoop on Don Mattrick's statements about how they envisioned a grand direct download future. There's nothing stopping them from adding that stuff to DD customers/games. Its a politically correct tantrum from a dev to say with such condecension "Well, we had all these plans, but if you want to OWN whats on your disc, we'll just have to scrub them ALL."